Tag Archives: mobo

I earned a couple C-notes a week or so back when my brother and I remodeled my niece’s bathroom. I’ve had the cash stashed away for a rainy day. I know it’s not raining. However, I really would like to have my video issue resolved. I have a really nice vid card (EVGA GeForce GTS-450) that I can’t even use with my current system because of issues with the PCIe 16 socket/circuitry. You can read more about that HERE and HERE.

Well, here’s what I did…

I was just for fun snooping around on CompUSA’s website (mistake #1), when I ran across THIS mobo on sale (limited number in stock). This model mobo is a few years old. When it first came out, it was a tad over $200.00 USD. CompUSA had it on sale for $99. This is a full size ATX mobo, very similar to my current GigaByte board.

I needed a mobo with all the ATX features that my GigaByte board has. Specifically, I needed two EIDE channels, 4 DIMM sockets, at least 2 SATA channels, a floppy controller, and a parport for my old printer. This new ASUS board had all that and more. It’s an SLI board, so if I ever want to run SLI, I can. It has a somewhat better Nvidia chipset than my GigaByte board. So, this is going to be a bit of an improvement for me.

A few minutes after clicking that BUY button at CompUSA, I wondered if I had an AMD cpu out in the shop that I could pop in to the old GigaByte board to make a really nice shop system. Well, I went out there and snooped around. While I do have some nice AMD processors out there, I don’t have any socket AM2 processors. Oh well. Then I had another thought (mistake #2)…

In for a penny, etc…

I went to a fav eBay seller whom I’ve dealt with a few times before. He always has some good used stuff for sale cheap. I searched through his eBay store and found an AMD Athlon64 X2 4000+ that came out of his own personal system (so he claims) and is guaranteed to work or money back. He wanted $35 for it. Not bad… you can still get them new for about $75. This guy has 100% feedback at eBay, and I have bought other items from him, as I said, so I’m pretty confident the processor is probably fine.

Being that this X2 (dual core) is an improvement over my current Athlon64 3800+ single core, I decided to buy it with the intention of installing it in the new board above. Since I name my machines based on the microprocessor being the heart of the machine, a change in cpu means a change in name. Hence, ericsbane03 will be renamed ericsshop01 (the new workshop system) with the old GigaByte board and the single core Athlon64 3800+. The new mobo with the Athlon64 X2 4000+ will become ericsbane04 (inside main system).

I’ll put ericsbane04 into the Cooler Master Nvidia tower that I just transferred ericsbane03 into the other day, along with the current drives and other hardware. I’ll put ericsshop01 into my old ericsbane02 beige tower that’s out in the shop right now. Clear as mud, huh? Is anyone really going to read all this carp I’m typing? Probably not. It’ll be archived here for my later perusing, though.

So, for a total of $146.00 (that I CANNOT afford), I’ll get two systems out of this deal; and best of all, I’ll get to have my vid card working again on my main system. I’ll be able to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. again! YAY! Besides that, 14K fps is so much nicer than 2900 fps.

OK, so I might not be able to eat this next couple weeks, but what the hell… I need to lost that last 10 lbs, anyway.

I got up bright and early on Wednesday last in anticipation of performing some computer projects that I had set aside to do.

I sat here at the computer desk with my hot cup of coffee steaming on the desk next to me. I reached out and clicked that ON button on the face of my tower. The buzzing and whirring began just as it always does. My Slackware boots in a relatively short time, so I scratched at myself and picked my nose while waiting. When I glanced up, the monitor was black. Hmm… that’s not good.

To make a long nightmare more enjoyable to read about, it turned out that I had some sort of dirty contact issue with my PCIe graphics card socket. Ain’t that a bitch? Well, I tried a little brush with alcohol. Nope. That didn’t work. I tried some compressed air. Nope. That didn’t fix it either. OK. I disassembled the system and removed my mobo completely. I took it outside to my shop (that’s when you know something’s serious).

I re-soldered all the pins on the socket, in case there was a cold/cracked solder joint. Not to worry, folks. I’m a professional. I spent the better part of my life servicing electronic products to component level. I have the tools and the skills. I don’t recommend you try this at home, though. Those boards are machine soldered (by Chinese machines that run on rice) and can easily be boogered up, if you don’t know what you’re doing.

So, while I had the mobo on the bench, I got a piece of emery paper and folded it and inserted it into the slot on the socket. I ran it back and forth, cleaning those little metal contacts as I went. I sprayed tuner cleaner in healthy amounts and blew the socket out with compressed air again. I took it back inside the house.

I reassembled the system and booted. YAY! It worked! Let’s hope it continues to do so because I have some more good stuff to tell you about in the next few days. I had a mini-installfest again. I installed Arch Linux (again) and installed Foresight Linux (also, again). I’ll post a bit about my adventures with that project and why it happened in a couple days.